The failure of Adrian VI to accomplish much was due largely to the shortness of his pontificate of only twenty months, and still more to the invincible corruption he found at Rome.
His really high sense of duty awakened no response save fear and hatred among the courtiers of the Medicis.

When he tried to restore the ruined finances of the church he was accused of niggardliness; when he made war on abuses he was called a barbarian; when he frankly confessed, in his appeal to the German Diets, that perchance the whole evil infecting the church came from the rottenness of the Curia, he was assailed as putting arms into the arsenal of the enemy.

His greatest crime in the eyes of his court was that he was a foreigner, an austere, phlegmatic man, who could understand neither their tongue nor their ways.
{379} Exhausted by the fruitless struggle, Adrian sank into his grave, a good pope unwept and unhonored as few bad popes have ever been.

On his tomb the cardinals wrote: "Here lies Adrian VI whose supreme misfortune in life was that he was called upon to rule." A like judgment was expressed more wittily by the people, who erected a monument to Adrian's physician and labeled it, "Liberatori Patriae." [Sidenote: Clement VII, 1523-34] The swing of the pendulum so often noticed in politics was particularly marked in the elections to the papacy of the sixteenth century.

In almost every instance the new pope was an opponent, and in some sort a contrast, to his predecessor.